Final Paper-- "Based on a Misprint"

*I was unable to figure out how to attach the notes. I guess you all can try and annotate some of the paper yourselves!-- Adam


Foreword

Based on a Misprint was the title of the email which the writer of this present note received the strange pages it perambulates. Although I am now a retired professor of literature (20 years in the English Department at Wordsmith College) the authors mother, Suzie Schatz-Benson, emailed me this essay asking for my opinion on its worth. I put down the current book I’m working on, a collaboration with a friend named Vivian, and picked up this undergraduate essay to see if it could help guide my study. Let me point out that, at first, I was simply horrified. After reading it again I modified my initial reaction.

Before I continue, I feel that I need to alert the reader of this commentary exactly who I am in this web of sense. In order to do so I will relate my relationship to the Benson family. I became an intimate correspondent to the family shortly after Adam attended, what I am told, was the first day of the class which this essay was composed for. We were first introduced through a mutual acquaintance, Clarence Choate Clark. Also, my “couple minute” proximity to Adam’s Sheridan, Wyoming residence (this lass could get to that male in four) also contributed to our correspondence leading to my current voice in the commentary.

This commentator may be excused for repeating what she has stressed in her own books and lectures, namely that “offensive” is frequently but a synonym for “unusual”; and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise. I have no intention to glorify Adam. No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of academic leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his opinions on the people and texture of Nabokov’s works are ludicrous. A desperate honesty that throbs through his essay does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for his studies that makes us entranced with the essay while abhorring its author!

As an essay, Based on a Misprint will become, no doubt, a classic in undergraduate circles. As a work of art, it transcends its expiatory aspects; and still more important to us than academic significance and literary criticism worth, is the ethical impact the essay should have on the serious academic. It warns us of dangerous trends; it points out potent evils. Based on a Misprint should make all of us— professors, students, educators— apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in the academic world.

To this essay we now must turn. The notes included should satisfy the most voracious reader. Let me state that without my notes Adam’s text simply has no academic reality. To this statement my dear Adam would probably not have subscribed, but, for better or worse, it is the commentator that has the last word.




Dame Nasbon, Ph.D.
December 6th, 2009




Based on a Misprint


“A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and the portals of discovery.”—James Joyce



I want my learned readers to participate in the scene I am about to replay; I want them to examine its every detail . A muscular, black bull with ivory-knife horns stands in the center of a bullfighting ring. The bull shoots sharp glances left and right looking for his competitor. He puffs smoke rings from his nostrils and paws in the dirt, lifting a small scuff of dust with a cloven gray hoof. Suddenly, from an open pair of green doors on one side of the ring, a ridge of dark brown earth overturns and rapidly approaches our focus. Something is tunneling into the ring. A mole perhaps? A gopher? Punxsutawney Phil? No. A long-eared, buck-toothed, wide-eyed rabbit toting one maroon suitcase and one forest-green suitcase erupts from the hole and gleefully announces, “well, here I am!” He looks around the ring in dismay. The rabbit clenches two fists and says in long drawn out skepticism “hey— just a cotton-picking minute. This don’t look like the Coachella Valley to me.” He reaches back down into his tunnel and pulls out a leaf-green and sea-blue map sliced into a grid on a piece of white paper. The rabbit ruminates over the map and mutters a sardonic “hmmm…” followed by the utterance “I knew I should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque.”

Hey you! You person up there holding this white paper in your hands staring down at these words wondering if I’m writing to you . You wonder how I’m at the end of the first page of an essay of Vladimir Nabokov and all you’ve read this far is a scene about Bugs Bunny? Do you think I possibly printed off the wrong paper and am just now realizing it? (Segno ) Do you think this is a mistake? No, it is far from a mistake and is most definitely intentional (al Coda) . I do understand where you are coming from though; you are undoubtedly feeling slightly perturbed at this point and asking yourself “how in the world does Bugs Bunny have anything at all to do with Vladimir Nabokov?” Well, the admirable reader who trusts in me will understand that this Bugs Bunny scene and the craftsmanship of Vladimir Nabokov have much in common (in addition to their disdain for Freudians) . To get at their comparability our focus should shift to Nabokov’s Pale Fire. In a moment appealing to any black humorist the poet John Shade, a character central to the masterpiece, desperately pens “Life Everlasting— based on a misprint!” (Pale Fire 62). John Shade, who had based his newly adopted spiritual outlook on the accuracy of a statement found in a magazine, found out that because of a misprint, an error, he might be (gulp) wrong! To put Shade’s fear more simply, while he thought he was definitely going to one place it turned out he might be going to another; both Shade and Bugs find they are not at a place they thought they were going, but rather, turned around and thrown off track by an error! What makes these characters situations more comparable is how they react to their errors. Bugs Bunny, upon discovering his mistake, does a remarkable thing in getting out of the hole, entering the ring, and engaging in the world he has mistakenly been led to; likewise, John Shade, who at first feels he has been led astray, engages in the realm the error has led him to and he quickly realizes that in fact he has actually stumbled upon the “real point” (hey you skeptic, did you just feel your spine tingle? ). The action of engagement leads us to the crux of this essay. In his works, (make sure to focus here reader!) Nabokov debunks the traditional perception of errors as bad, wrong, and useless and asserts the ability of so-called errors to act as portals leading the persistent reader to fantastic, new knowledge.

In the interpretation of the “cryptogrammic paper chase” section of Lolita, errors, misinterpretations, mistaken trails, and the like all have a vast import (Lolita 250). After Humbert Humbert strikes out to find the person responsible for the capture of Lolita he eventually loses the obvious trail to Lolita’s captor. H.H. needs to adapt quickly if he hopes to regain the scent. He does not give up when the he seems to run out of evidence but notes how he “discovered at once that he (the captor) had forseen my investigations and had planted insulting pseudonyms for my special benefit” (Lolita 248). Before continuing, it must be noted that Humbert is an unreliable narrator; simply because he believes that there are “clues” planted for him by Lolita’s captor in various hotel registries does not necessarily mean that “Harry, Bumper. Sheridan, Wyo.” is referring to an 18th century play Humbert had recently been trying to interest Lolita in (Lolita 250). Because of his unstable status as an unreliable narrator the reader must consider these supposed clues to be errors in H.H.’s judgment. However, it is crucial to see how H.H. reacts to this mistaken trail. He practically relishes in the chase set up for him (if not by the captor then who?) exclaiming how investigating each registry “challenged my scholarship… what a shiver of triumph and loathing shook my frail frame when… his fiendish conundrum would ejaculate in my face” (Lolita 250). The close, attentive reading that H.H. gives to the Hotel registries he stumbles upon allows him to flex his intellectual muscle. Each new list under his attentive glare becomes swollen with literary references and allusions. H.H.’s toilest engagement in the wasteland of names replaces an ordinary view with an extraordinary one.

Silly, H.H. you say. How does he really think that all these names, while convincingly linked to literary references, have anything to do with his chase? He is simply being toyed with! Well frigid ladies and gentlemen of H.H’s jury , I have something grave to report to you. Ready? Take one or two deep breaths. Ok, H.H. is being toyed with but so are you! You, as a reader of the text Lolita, are more closely intertwined with the hairy-armed ape than you would like to think. In fact “virtually every ‘move’ in the ‘true story’ Lolita seems to be structured with their predictable responses in mind; and the game-element depends on such reflexive action, for it tests the reader” (Appel lvii). Not only are the moves structured for you but “the traps are baited with tempting ‘false scents’” (Appel lviii). Do you recall the song that H.H. recites on page 61, back when the mystery was unsolved? “O my Carmen, my little Carmen!... and the gun I killed you with, O my Carmen,/ The gun I am holding now” (Lolita 61). For those of you cultured enough to be aware of Bizet’s famous opera the final scene in Act IV where Don José kills Carmen should ring a bell. As seems the obvious connection Lolita is intended to be linked to Carmen and Humbert Humbert to Don José. So, knowing what we know about Carmen this is an obvious foreshadowing of Humbert Humbert’s eventual murder of Lolita right? (skip ahead, skip ahead). Wrong! H.H. doesn’t kill Lolita in the end. Like H.H., some unseen force has moved you the reader to make an erroneous assumption about the end of the novel. This is only one of many instances in the book in which you have been fooled by a “false scent” leading you to mistaken conclusions (Vivian is the male author, the gal author is Clare … really?).

As I look out I can see that some of you are fuming at this realization of being misled, fooled, conned, bamboozled, flimflammed, and foxed. Please sir, you sparking the lighter with a shaky thumb, do not ignite the messenger . If you are only patient I can direct you to the real hand moving all the pieces – the man behind the curtain . This treacherous fiend is no other than Vivian Darkbloom! This collaborator of Clare Quilty is responsible for leading you astray reader. Confused? When you take closer look Vivian Darkbloom jumps off the page, crawls off the folds, and mans the pen when you rearrange the anagram; Vivian Darkbloom becomes (jumble jumble ) Vladimir Nabokov.

Before you relegate Nabokov to the eighth circle and tenth ditch of lower hell I will provide the author’s proper defense that should illuminate his genius (D.S. al Coda) . (Coda) Firstly, Nabokov is definitely in control of reader as evident in Speak, Memory when he says “I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip” (Speak, Memory 139). Nabokov must have purpose in this tactic. That purpose seems to be revealed in a passionate attack on the popular lack of consideration and thought when he says “nervous publishers of popular novels pamper the ‘average reader’— who should not be made to think” (Speak, Memory 124). Reader, Nabokov is only thinking in your best interest by asserting your worth as a human and stating that you deserve literature that is not only entertaining but also thought provoking. He has taken upon himself to provide you with books befitting a reader of your intellect and calling him a cheat is how you repay him? Lucky for you, Nabokov is a forgiving author; he understands that everyone makes errors, and, in fact, he really wants you to reconsider errors too.

In one of Nabokov’s most poetic and emotional passages of Pale Fire he provides his most eloquent defense of the nature of errors. Shade, in his glorious epiphanic response to the destitution caused by an error, says:
“But all at once it dawned on me that this/ Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme;/ Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream/ But topsy-turvical coincidence,/ Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense./ Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find/ Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind/ Of correlated pattern in the game,/ Plexed artistry, and something of the same/ Pleasure in it as they who played it found” (Pale Fire 62). Not only has Shade escaped depression but he has discovered the point; mistakes are not separate from the path of discovery, rather, they are interlinked in the great “web of sense” that makes up all knowledge. Making a mistake puts the person in a position to learn something new that they did not even set out to discover.

Beware reader, making discoveries is not easy though. The person who learns the most from their mistakes must have one of the most amiable qualities (are those Palanese birds I hear cawing ?)— awareness. It will not suffice to make mistakes without an awareness of the learning opportunities that the mistakes can afford. Through Shade, Nabokov frames mistakes and errors not as things that lead away from discovery but straight into it for an aware and attentive person. Shade exuberantly concludes his revelation with “making ornaments/ Of accidents and possibilities” (Pale Fire 62). According to this doctrine not only are errors and accidents portals to discovery but they should be celebrated as highly useful opportunity to learn something new .

Reader, by this point I think that you must be convinced in Nabokov’s ability to successfully use errors and mistakes. He subjects his characters to them, and, when they discover the mistaken trail you lament their wrong turn. However, you quickly realize that you are also one of his characters following a path laid out before you. The paths not only lead you to false assumptions about his texts but more importantly to allow for you to confront your so-called “errors” and give you an opportunity to learn something new. When Nabokov wants you to be his ideal reader he doesn’t mean never to make errors; he wants you to learn from your errors. While reading his book you can be assured that many of the mistakes you make were set up for you and that he has not lead you away from discovery, but closer to other discoveries that you never even knew to be after. Remember though, to get after the discoveries that Nabokov sets you towards you must be aware of the texture of the path, the web of sense, and how the path you have taken is just another link in the chain. Each error and mistake leads you closer to the end, and when you close the book, you must turn back to the beginning, peruse the first lines and think “And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time” (Eliot 39). Then, you will read the book again, and again, and again …




Works Cited

Appel Jr., Alfred. Introduction. Lolita. By Vladimir Nabokov. 1955. First Vintage Books
Edition, 1991. ix- lxvii . Print.

Eliot, T.S. Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. pg. 39.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Print.
--- Pale Fire. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Print.
--- Speak, Memory. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Print.